1st Grade

James Rizzi was an American Pop Artist who is most well-known for his fun, bright, and cartoon-like depictions of skyscrapers. His skyscrapers typically feature faces with various expressions.

We kicked things off by talking about space in Rizzi's work. We noticed that just because some buildings were bigger than others, doesn't mean that the bigger building was closer to us. We came to the conclusion that this idea of space was created by Rizzi's use of overlapping buildings. We also discussed the difference between foreground and background. We also talked about how buildings are typically made up of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines. Students drew 3 large buildings and added faces and windows to them. They finished off the class by tracing everything they drew with a black crayon.

Next, we added 3 smaller buildings to go in our background and then traced them with a black crayon. We brushed up on ROY G BIV from last year and then used liquid watercolors to paint our buildings in rainbow order.

On the last day, we finished up painting our buildings. Then painted our sky black. Lastly, we did some splatter painting with white paint to add stars to our sky.

1st grade recently finished up their project on Joaquin Torres Garcia. He was a Constructivist from Uruguay who used the primary colors in his work. His work looks a lot like Piet Mondrian’s except that Joaquin’s also uses some symbols within his work. Joaquin’s strong use of vertical and horizontal lines was a good recap for my 1st graders.

We broke up our paper into various vertical and horizontal lines which created different sized squares and rectangles when they overlapped. Then we added other lines that we knew like angles and curves. We added a few symbols such as fish, people, houses, etc. Last but not least, we retraced everything with a black crayon.

The second (and final) day of the project we used tempera cakes to paint everything using only our primary colors.